On a long hike, it is always worth taking a moment every now and then to reflect on the ground that has been covered. The first edition of Manna Matters came out in April 2009, and since then it has remained the flagship of Manna Gum’s message. Back then, the whole thing was a very uncertain venture, so to have reached 50 editions seems a milestone worthy of celebrating and giving thanks. The feedback that many of you have graciously provided over the years makes us confident that Manna Matters has made a good contribution, however small and marginal. Whatever happens in coming years, it will have been worth it.
A lot has changed since 2009. The front page of that first edition has a photo of my family in the backyard of our rental property in Footscray. Renting in Footscray was still pretty cheap back then. My daughters, then five and three, are now in university and beginning to step independently into the world. Two months before that photo, the Black Saturday Bushfires wreaked destruction across Victoria, including where we now live next to bushland on the edge of Bendigo. That year was also the nadir of the Millennium Drought; the general concern about climate change in Australia was then elevated to a seriousness and level of consensus that now seems hard to imagine. In 2007, Kevin Rudd declared that climate change was ‘the great moral challenge of our generation’, a position that contributed significantly to his landslide election victory.
In 2009, we were still living in the fallout of the Global Financial Crisis, and there is an article in that first edition discussing what to do with ‘Manna from Kevin’, referring to the $900 cash handouts by which the Rudd Government encouraged us to consume our way out of recession. Interest rates dropped to new lows, making housing loans cheap and adding further fuel to already mushrooming house prices. Back then, even though the writing was on the wall, talk of a housing crisis was still marginal to the public consciousness. How quickly the ground changes. How quickly we forget.
Manna Matters has itself changed over that time. In that first edition, I signalled my expectation that Manna Matters would typically be four to six pages long. The next edition was ten pages, and the one after sixteen, and there it sat until we bumped up to twenty pages in 2022. We have been forced to concede that, despite the cultural pressure for brevity, the issues we confront demand depth.
And what are the issues Manna Matters confronts? At core, this has not changed over 50 issues. My first lead article was entitled, ‘Matter Matters’. This compact pun signals the foundation of a biblical perspective of material life. When the Gospel of John announced that ‘the Word became flesh’, and that ‘God so loved the kosmos’, it underlined God’s fundamental concern for how we live this life in this world.
When the Gospel of John announced that ‘the Word became flesh’, and that ‘God so loved the kosmos’, it underlined God’s fundamental concern for how we live this life in this world.
Over the last 50 editions, Manna Matters has endeavoured to uncover, fragment by fragment, the vast implications of this testimony. Articles have covered a broad range: from the history of the capitalist world system to how to make your own cordial; from the global politics of climate change to what to do with cat poo; from regenerative agriculture to indigenous justice and the future of the church. All the way along we have grappled with issues of money, property, production, consumption, investment, waste, land, food, and housing. Articles have consistently drawn attention to the ways in which our economic system treats the Earth and people badly, but also to the ways in which we could do things differently.
Through the whole journey we have endeavoured to confront all of these issues within a single, coherent biblical lens. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Manna Matters has been to demonstrate that such a thing is possible. This has required an intensive process of re-engaging the Bible and unpacking the hidden depths of its language of sin, salvation, redemption, holiness, and judgement; re-focussing again and again on its core narrative of calling people to a new way of living.
The work has just begun. I hope you can share some of this journey with us